Friday, March 5, 2010

Digging Deep

How many times have we had those moments of "oh I'm a little sore.", or "I'm just too tired."? How many times have we said "I want to do that." but come up short? My post today involves two things...an article I read in Runners World and my treadmill sprint today.

First, the article. You ever hear of a guy named Matt Long? Yeah, me neither. Not until I read March 2009's Runners World. This story, it's incredible. Check it out here. Basically, this New York City firefighter, Boston Marathon qualifier, and Ironman got hit by a bus and beat up pretty bad. Bad to the point that he couldn't walk, had no right glute muscle, and had over 40 surgeries. He was broken down and couldn't figure out a reason to live anymore. Then he woke up and wanted to do a marathon. That's right. Hit by a bus and he wanted to do a marathon. And he succeeded. 7 hours later, he succeeded. Imagine that. I was reading the article (again) on the flight down to Tulsa and it gave me chills. Here was a guy who just longed to run. A guy who wanted nothing more than to be what he was. Inspirational, eh? More on this in a bit.

Second, my workout today. You know by now in Tulsa I don't run outside. And no, the article didn't inspire me to do that. But I did hit the treadmill, like I like to in Tulsa. About 20 minutes into my workout, I was feeling achy. Probably due to the fact this was my 2nd day of running in a row (4.62 miles yesterday). My body isn't quite up to 2 days in a row yet, and I wanted to stop. But you can see where I'm gonna go here. I thought of Matty Long. The guy who has a titanium rod through his leg. All he wanted to do was run. And here I was going to complain about a little ache in my legs?

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Another one of Brandon's moments where he has the lightbulb go off. No, this isn't about me. This is about our community. The triathlete community. You know, there's days where our bodies tell us to take it easy. I respect that and adhere to it. But then there's days where we slack. Days where we are lazy. Imagine if you DIDN'T have that choice; if your only option was to be lazy.